A few years ago I wrote a post titled Software Patterns are Useless in which I was drawing attention to the overhyping of the concept of software design patterns. In short, they are either too simple or too complex to bundle together into a concept to be studied, much less used as a lingua franca for coders.

I still feel this way, but in this post I want to explore what I think the differences are between software design patterns and building architecture design patterns. In the beginning, as you no doubt know from the maniacal introduction in design patternese by any of its enthusiasts, it was a construction architect that noticed common themes in solving the problems required to building something. This happened around the time I was born, so 40 years ago. In about ten years, software people started to import the concept and created this collection of general solutions to software problems. It was a great idea, don't get me wrong.

However, things have definitely changed in software since then. While we still meet some of the problems we invented software design patterns for, the problems or at least their scope has changed immensely. To paraphrase a well known joke, design patterns would be similar in construction and software if you would first construct a giant robot to build your house by itself. But it doesn't happen like this, instead the robot is actually the company itself, its purpose being to take your house specifications and build it. So how useful would a "pattern" be for a construction company saying "if you need a house, hire a construction company"?

Look at MVC, a software design pattern that is implemented everywhere in the web world, at different levels of abstractions. You use ASP.Net MVC, for example, to separate the logic from the rendering on the server, but then you use Angular to separate logic from rendering on the client. We are very clever young men, but it's MVCs all the way down! How is that a pattern anymore? "If you want to separate rendering from logic, use MVC" "How do I implement it?" "Oh, just use a framework that was built for you". At the other end of the spectrum there are things that are so simple and basically embedded in programming languages that thinking of them as patterns is pointless. Iterator is one of them. Now even Javascript has a .forEach construct, not to mention generators and iterators. Or Abstract Factory - isn't that just a factory for factories? Should I invent a new name for the pattern that creates a factory of factories for factories?

But surely there are patterns that are very useful and appropriate for our work today. Like the factory pattern, or the builder, the singleton or inversion of control and so many others. Of course they are, I am not debating that at all. I am going to present inversion of control soon to a group of developers. I even find it useful to split these patterns into categories like creational, structural, behavioral, concurrency, etc. Classification in general is a good thing. It's the particulars that bother me.

Take the seminal book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma et al. 1994). And by seminal I mean so influential that the Wikipedia URL is Design_Patterns. Not (book) or the complete title or anything. If you followed the software design patterns link from higher up you noticed that design patterns are still organized around those 23 original ones from the book written by "the Gang of Four" more than twenty years ago.

I want to tell you that this is wrong, but I've seen it in so many other fields. There is one work that is so ground breaking that it becomes the new ground. Everything else seems to build upon it from then on. You cannot be taken seriously unless you know about it and what it contains. Any personal contribution of yours must needs reference the great work. All the turtles are stacked upon it. And it is dangerous, encouraging stagnation and trapping you in this cage that you can only get out of if you break it.

Does that mean that I am writing my own book that will break ground and save us all? No. The patterns, as described and explained in so many ways around the 'net are here to stay. However note the little changes that erode the staleness of a rigid classification, like "fluent interfaces" being used instead of "builder pattern", or the fact that no one in their right mind will try to show off because they know what an iterator is, or the new patterns that emerge not from evaluating multiple cases and extracting a common theme, but actually inventing a pattern to solve the problems that are yet to come, like MVVM.

I needed to write this post, which very much mirrors the old one from a few years ago, because I believe calling a piece of software that solves a problem a pattern increasingly sounds more like patent. Like biologists walking the Earth in the hope they will find a new species to name for themselves, developers are sometimes overdefining and overusing patterns. Remember it is all flexible, that a pattern is supposed to be a common theme in written code, not a rigid way of writing your code from a point on. If software patterns are supposed to be the basis of a common language between developers, remember that all languages are dynamic, alive, that no one speaks the way the dictionaries and manuals tell you to speak. Let your mind decide how to write and next time someone scoffs at you asking "do you know what the X pattern is?" you respond with "let me google that for you". Let patterns be guides for the next thing to come, not anchors to hold you back.